The Race Riot series is some ways is a brief history of materiality and struggle. Like much of my work from this period (2009-2011), it is building a visual vocabulary between the home (domesticity, safety, comfort), political space (why houses are abandoned, why people burn buildings, how poverty exists in some places more than others), and the realm of meaning (why do we care, why would I waste time looking at this stuff, where did these things come from, etc). I wanted the works to intervene on the established artistic genre that were developing meaning at a time when the chasms between the haves and have nots were increasing and as artistic practices were diverging. I wanted to offer something that could rest between the performative, the political and the conceptual. The Race Riot work needed to use strategies similar to those considered during the post war/post industrial era, aspects of abstraction and minimalism, but it needed to be loaded with the reality of the history of those materials. I am not trying to divorce history from material, but marry. People should know that there is a relationship between abandoned buildings, the civil rights struggle and late 1950's aesthetics. The challenge is that those conflations don't always lead to something that we'd want to call ART. As a result, I decided that there should be multiple projects- some which exist in the museum, some the art fair, some on the block and some unspoken. It is the aggregation of these practices and moments of meaning making that constitute a full life. Art is merely a part of that.

In the Event of A Race Riot offers us all a chance to be reflective on these histories and heartened by the potency and resilience of the human spirit and the hood. The works suggest that beauty is embedded as is struggle.